Hassle free eZ Publish setup

This is not another how to setup Ubuntu to run eZ Publish guide...well not really.

One of the biggest hurdles when getting started with eZ Publish is successfully installing the CMS. This process often fails because the system on which it is being installed is not configured correctly. If you do not have a helpful systems administrator handy it can be quite difficult to get past the initial steps.

There are a number of solutions that allow you to manage the configuration of computer systems. Two of the most popular are Puppet & Chef. These systems allow you to create "recipes" of how systems should be setup.

It's a bit like a guide to setting up eZ publish on Ubuntu but doesn't require you to manually follow the steps (and that you can keep under revision control)! It can also be rerun time and time again with the same result.

This doesn't help unless you have a system to apply it to and it would help if it was a system that you could trash if you wanted.

Introducing VagrantVagrant is a very cool tool that manages VirtualBox virtual machines (VM). It will also provision (setup, configure) those VMs with Puppet (and Chef). This makes it an great complementary tool for testing your Puppet configurations. Vagrant can also be used to manage multiple VMs, allowing it to be used to test configurations with more than one system (e.g. separate systems running application and database).

Getting up and running
Once you have required software installed on your local system and the eZ Publish sample Vagrant setup checked out you can have a VM with the latest version of eZ Publish running by running one command - "vagrant up".

Running this for the first time will take a while as the base Ubuntu 10.4 LTS image needs to be downloaded. It's around 400Mb so depending on your connection speed it may take some time. The good news is that the base image is only downloaded once and can be used for other Vagrant managed VMs.

Once the "vagrant up" command has finished running visiting http://33.33.33.10/ will display the eZ Publish configuration wizard. A kickstart.ini file has been pre-configured with all the details to perform the installation.

Clicking "Next" will run the installation with the default parameters defined in the eZ Publish Puppet module. This will take a little time as the packages for the eZFlow Clean Site need to be downloaded and installed.

Quick guide to Vagrant commands
The VM can be shutdown by running "vagrant halt" and started again by running "vagrant up". reloading is as simple as "vagrant reload"

Once you are finished you can destroy the VM by running "vagrant destroy". Running "vagrant up" will setup new VM and provision it from scratch.

Last words
I've done my testing on a Linux system but you should be able to try this out on any system that can run ruby & VirtualBox. The Vagrant site has a guide on getting systems setup for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris.

In the preface to the current Admin interface specification the last paragraph caught my eye:A overview of user task need a dashboard, where she can follow here own content, approval and other tasks she might do on a regular basis.I recently saw a demo of the latest version of the bug tracking system JIRA 4.0 by Atlassian. It used an OpenSocial dashboard to allow users to customise their homepage to access and interact with information that was important to them. The system not only displays JIRA widgets but any OpenSocial widgets (and those from other Atlassian products). You can check out a video of it in action here and more information on how Atlassian is using OpenSocial here.

What is OpenSocial? From the official site:OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML,
developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds. Google personal home page is an example of an OpenSocial da…

The Admin Interface Refresh project has had a concept implemented that can be reviewed live with an eZ Publish install. This is a guide on how to get things working.

The new Admin Interface design is a prototype and it's constantly being refined so don't try this on your production servers.

Starting from a clean install of eZ Publish 4.2 with the the eZ Flow package (with content)Change into the design directory # cd designCheckout the design# svn co http://pubsvn.ez.no/nextgen/trunk/design/admin2Edit settings/siteaccess/admin_site/site.ini.append.php and change the SiteDesign to admin2[DesignSettings]SiteDesign=admin2Grab new menu.ini - this is required to display the left hand menus under Setup and My account.# cd settings/siteaccess/admin_site/# wget http://pubsvn.ez.no/nextgen/trunk/settings/menu.iniClear the cacheYou should now be able to view the new interface and it should look something like this:

To revert back to the original interface:Remove the menu.ini from the ad…